Happiness & introverts

Blog #39 – Happiness & introverts  A few years ago, I was giving a lecture on what behaviours and traits research tells us are most linked with higher levels of happiness when one of the students present raised a hand and indicated that she had a question. I had been going through the typical list…

Resilience

Blog #38 – Resilience As made clear in our most recent posts, having a sense of purpose and meaning is undoubtedly a good thing and has been associated with many positive health outcomes, as well as achievement in various areas of life. We can think of purpose and meaning as the fuel that gets us…

Meaning and Purpose II

Blog #37 – Meaning and purpose II Last time, we focused on the importance of cultivating a sense of purpose and meaning in life as it relates to individual well-being. We concluded by referring to Russell Grieger’s three-step process designed to help individuals identify and act on their true ‘passionate purpose’, with the first two…

Meaning and purpose

Blog #36 – Meaning and purpose   It should not surprise that this series regularly refers back to the ‘three happy lives’, first elaborated on in one of our earliest posts, as the ideas expressed therein resonate with just any topic you can think of related to happiness and well-being. Without engaging in a lengthy…

Making a difference in the workplace

Blog #35 – Making a difference in the workplace It is all well and good to make the case that the business community needs to pay more heed to well-being in the workplace, but at some point the practical implications of doing so must be tackled. In other words, all the statistics in the world…

Well-being and the workplace

Blog #34 – Well-being and the workplace “The wellness-at-work movement is accelerating in the U.S. at a time when employers generally are desperate to cut costs, and you have to wonder why. Employers on average will spend 15% more per employee on wellness programs this year than last… As work becomes increasingly cognitive, fast-changing, and…

Money & happiness – ways to make it work

Blog #32 – Money & happiness – ways to make it work   The relationship between money and happiness is a topic worth lingering on, as it deals with two things that people tend to spend a lot of time (perhaps too much) thinking about. In previous posts, we have highlighted common misconceptions around the…

Life Satisfaction

Blog #33 – Life satisfaction   We have touched on this topic before, but it is important to pay specific attention to the distinction between happiness and life satisfaction, as it relates to well-being. In early posts in this series, we highlighted the potential for disappointment if an individual’s sole strategy for boosting their well-being…

Money & happiness revisited

Several months ago, we devoted an entry in this series to the relationship between money and happiness. More specifically, we highlighted research findings suggesting the sometimes unquestioned assumption that more money will make us happier does not stand up to close scrutiny. What that research – conducted by Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton – found…

The benefits of negative emotions

The benefits of negative emotions   Having devoted several posts recently to the area of increasing happiness, we shifted gears a little last time out and focused on the potential hazards of being too committed to the idea of cultivating positivity. In today’s post, we will take that one step further and highlight some of…